Graphics: Unknown Masters in Wood

Just as U.S. servicemen and college
students tack pictures of Raquel Welch or travel posters on their
walls, so merchants and tradesmen in 18th and 19th century Japan
delighted in cheap, mass-produced wood-block prints, or hanga.
These genre pictures showed well-known actors or courtesans of the day,
picturesque views of Mount Fuji and picaresque travel scenes. They
were known as ukiyo-e, literally "pictures of the floating
world," because to devout Buddhists everyday existence was a
transient stage in man's journey to nirvana. Yet the lasting charm and
skill with which the...